Age might be the single most reliable indicator of corporate loyalty.
That's according to research by John J. Clancy, associate director of the American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis and author of a book on corporate loyalty, "The Old Dispensation."
"Older workers tend to display more loyalty to their companies; sometimes the company can't do anything bad enough to shake them," says Clancy. "When IBM made their first layoffs in the late 1980s--which they'd never done before--some downsized workers nevertheless remained loyal, rationalizing their own job loss and making excuses for the company."
Clancy reviewed public opinion poll data, going back more than 50 years, for his book. Though Clancy notes that such polls rarely addressed the issue of corporate loyalty directly, they did measure a number of closely related attitudes.
"There is no historical data on loyalty per se, but you can track it through surrogates. What you find is that poll data on things like trust, confidence in institutional leadership and the feeling of connectedness to society drops sharply beginning in the mid-1960s. This continues through the mid-1970s, when it settles into a slower, but still steady, decline," says Clancy.
With this background in hand, Clancy designed a survey to specifically measure employee attitudes on subjects such as organizational commitment, individualism, job satisfaction and work ethic. He distributed the survey to a total of 791 high-technology workers, receiving 307 responses, and further honed those findings through almost 100 personal interviews.
Clancy then began to analyze his date. For example, a query as deceptively simple as "Tell me about yourself" could be interpreted a variety of ways, depending on whether the subject began with a personal description ("I'm a father"), a business description (I'm a software developer") or some combination of the two. That data was then grouped according to three age cohorts--those born before 1941, those born between 1941 and 1955, and those born after 1955.
As he'd suspected, Clancy found that the most reliable indicator of corporate loyalty was age group.
"The youngest cohort simply don't expect loyalty," says Clancy. "They tend to see employment in purely transactional terms. They hope to learn something, and they trust the company will gain something as well, but it's a very impersonal, rational connection--worlds away from the emotional attachment we see with older subjects. The youngest cohort takes it for granted that a company acts solely in its own economic interest."
It's the middle group, the baby-boom generation, which displays the most ambivalence.
"Older workers, with a strong foundation of loyal attitudes, survived events like layoffs and restructurings with loyalty largely intact. But the middle group, socialized in a different time, lost their faith under the pressure of these events. They're the ones who feel most betrayed by downsizing."
The prevalent view that loyalty results from a contract is seriously in error, says Clancy. And the corollary--that employees lose their loyalty when companies begin to eschew paternalism is flawed in that it appears to be true for the baby boomers but it is not true for their older or their younger colleagues.
While some observers of corporate America have seen the end of institutional loyalty as an unalloyed good, freeing people from dependence and allowing them to exercise greater autonomy, Clancy argues that this freedom exacts a price from individuals, from companies and from the economy.
"People have an innate need for loyalty. Companies need loyal employees to function efficiently, and the economy needs large corporations built on some type of loyalty," says Clancy.
Perceiving that employees no longer are loyal to the company, companies no longer feel any obligation to them even during good economic times. On the other side of the coin, Clancy points out that companies, by not having that reservoir of employee experience and goodwill to rely on, "lose long-term perspective and a certain amount of initiative and risk taking."
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Editors: Clancy spent 25 years at the St. Louis-based aerospace firm McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing), where he rose from programmer to president of his division. He can be reached at 314- 935-8269 (office). Please call Steve Infanti of Dick Jones Communications 814-867-1963 or [email protected]
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